There are also six times more apps in the store than at launch.

More than 100 million copies of Windows 8 have been sold in its first six months on the market, according to a Q&A with Windows division Chief Marketing Officer and Chief Financial Officer Tami Reller.

The post confirms that the Windows Blue update will become available later in the year. Among other things, this serves as an opportunity for Microsoft to "respond to the customer feedback" that the company has no doubt been inundated with since Windows 8 was released.

The Windows 8 license count wasn't the only number mentioned. The company claims that the number of apps in the Windows Store has increased by six times since launch. There have been 250 million app downloads, and about 90 percent of all apps get downloaded each month.

Microsoft's cloud services are also picking up users, with a claimed 250 million SkyDrive users, 400 million active Outlook.com users, and 700 million active Microsoft Accounts. The transition from Hotmail to Outlook.com recently completed, with all users now using the new e-mail platform several weeks ahead of schedule.

This is the third time that Microsoft has talked about how many units Windows 8 has shifted. Forty million copies were sold in the first month, rising to 60 million a month later. The sales rate has certainly slowed since then, with just 40 million copies sold in the last four months. This is not in itself unusual; past operating systems have seen an initial surge of sales before leveling off.

Good? Bad? Microsoft's detractors will inevitably point out that Windows 7 picked up market share at a quicker rate, and thus Windows 8 is a failure. The company's supporters will point out in turn that Windows 8 is primarily a consumer play, and that businesses are still in the process of migrating from the 11 and a half year old Windows XP to Windows 7. Such slow-moving companies are hardly likely to let the release of a new operating system disrupt their transition plans.

Microsoft, for its part, is acting upbeat about the numbers, emphasizing that Windows 8 represents a big change and explaining that big changes take time. Reller also said that the PC is "very much alive," and that it's now part of a broader market of tablets as well as (traditional) PCs.

The 100 million figure does suggest that the PC isn't quite dead yet. A rate of 10 million copies per month isn't too shabby. The iPad, which according to its proponents is going to bring about the end of the PC (and hence the end of Windows), sold 6.5 million units a month last quarter. By most metrics, that's lower than the number of Windows 8 licenses sold.

I'm pretty sure no-one at Apple ever said the iPad was going to bring about the end of the PC era. Jobs made that post-PC comment as something that is happening, and it's not far off - we use tablets and phones now for a lot of what we used laptops for a few years ago.

That doesn't detract from the story though. Windows 8 almost can't be unsuccessful. It's installed by default on all new PCs, and Win7 is getting harder to find at retail.

I'm pretty sure no-one at Apple ever said the iPad was going to bring about the end of the PC era. Jobs made that post-PC comment as something that is happening, and it's not far off - we use tablets and phones now for a lot of what we used laptops for a few years ago.

That doesn't detract from the story though. Windows 8 almost can't be unsuccessful. It's installed by default on all new PCs, and Win7 is getting harder to find at retail.

This was what Jobs said:

"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that's what you needed on the farms." Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular."PCs are going to be like trucks," Jobs said. "They are still going to be around." However, he said, only "one out of x people will need them."Jobs said advances in chips and software will allow tablet devices like the iPad to do tasks that today are really only suited for a traditional computer, things like video editing and graphic arts work.The move, Jobs said, will make many PC veterans uneasy, "because the PC has taken us a long ways.""We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable," he said.

It really riles me that people are rejecting Windows 8 because it does not have a fucking 'Start' button. The mindless stupidity of it just boggles the mind.

Windows 8 is fast, lean and a impressive OS. It continues the great work done on Windows 7 and really builds on that foundation. How fucking stupid are these people that they don't understand the Metro start screen is just a full screen modern version of the start button? Lowest Common Denominator morons dragging the rest of us down with them.

I think this reflects more on the demand for computers rather than the merits of Windows 8.

So true.

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As for the apps, quality matters much more than quantity, and quality is what is lacking.

When was last time you checked? I found everything I need for my RT tablet and then some. But really, how can you replace the Office that you get with the RT tablet? You can't if you need it. My wife and kid need it. For us it was a no brainer decision to go with Windows tablets.

Well, it's all rumors at this point, but signs point to a new apple-like approach to Windows. Meaning upgrades will be $25-50. I wouldn't be surprised though if Microsoft just made it a subscription service. Pay for service all year and get the latest upgrades, rather than buying them one at a time.

I'd imagine you have to "buy in" to Windows 8 first, but I can't see it as a "price hike".

So, 2.5 attach rate for App Store downloads per install. That is NOT a healthy validation of the Win8 "metro" app model or market. Heck, I've downloaded a few dozen myself, and have probably launched only three in the last month. Given how many of those 250 downloads were probably done by curious tire-kickers like myself, I bet a whole swath of Win 8 systems haven't seen a single app download.

On my relatively big-screen systems, those full-screen apps are pretty darn annoying. And I've yet to see anyone make a HTML5 Win8 app as rich or functional as a real web page or a real app.

It really riles me that people are rejecting Windows 8 because it does not have a fucking 'Start' button. The mindless stupidity of it just boggles the mind.

Windows 8 is fast, lean and a impressive OS. It continues the great work done on Windows 7 and really builds on that foundation. How fucking stupid are these people that they don't understand the Metro start screen is just a full screen modern version of the start button? Lowest Common Denominator morons dragging the rest of us down with them.

Sorry, but you're wrong.

Metro is like the whacking great buttons on a pre-schooler's toy. I don't need a 3 inch wide button on my desktop monitor for Cow goes Moo thanks very much.

I've got developers trial Windows 8 running as a VM and behind the childish interface is superficially the same OS as Windows 7. I'm sure Windows 8 is more advanced but the user experience with BIG METRO BUTTONS in your face, frankly sucks balls. If the UX is all Win 8 brings to the table for most users, it ain't got shit.

Well two of those licenses are mine, I picked them up at the rock bottom price when Windows 8 first came out. The kicker, for Microsoft, is that I am NOT using them and I bet I'm probably not the only person feeling that way about Windows 8. A better measure of the success of Windows 8 would be how many of the licenses are being used... but I don't know there is any way that MS can generate that info even if they were inclined to. (Although with their cloud login feature, perhaps that would give them telemetry.)

Hopefully the Blue update will fix the reasons why I am sticking with Windows 7 for the foreseeable future, and I'll investigate updating again when it comes out. (In case you care: I want my Start button and a non-context switched Start Menu (I want it on the SAME screen as my Desktop and the programs running on it.) I want zero-touch driven UI... and I want less modal apps not more. When they made it tablet-ized they made a bunch of stuff full screen... this is idiotic on a huge multi-screen monitor system where touch is not desired let alone available.)

Basically I want them to back-port the core OS improvements to Windows 7 SP2, and then if they want to EOL Windows on Desktop I'm fine with that. They should have two OSes, not one... Like the Mac... one for non-touch driven power users like myself... and then a completely separate one for mobile stuff. They already "shot" the guy that came up with this ridiculous merger of desktop and mobile OSes... now they just have to seriously admit its a screw-up and hit the big undo button and take Windows 8 out back and shoot it too.

the 15% decline in PC sales and the 19 million iPads sold last quarter beg to differ. That was a 66% increase YOY for iPads. Apple will likely sell 90 million iPad's this year on top of the 100 million plus sold already if they can sell 19 million in the post holiday quarter.

Not bad for a 3 year old product that was widely mocked by the competition.

its also the fastest growing electronic device ever. faster than Walkman, iPod, iPhone or any game console.

meanwhile PC's sales continue to slide away and the netbook market is all but destroyed.

PC sales have peaked and there is no going back to heights they once enjoyed

Not quite. Remember, a license being bought doesn't mean it's installed. Companies can buy licenses and downgrade to 7, (just as when 7 came out, companies bought licenses and downgraded to XP), OEMs buy bulk licenses to stick on their machines, et cetera.

We don't know attach rate per active Windows 8 machine from this data.

I bought my mother a brand new desktop machine with a top of the line CPU for the time (AMD 6 core 1090 with 16G of RAM if my memory serves) the year before the iPad came out. She used it for everything, but struggled mightily, as many elderly do. (Why don't my video's play right on this site... why can't I print this page from that site... I'm sure everyone who ever supported their parent's computering knows the questions...)

When the iPad came out, I bought it for her as a replacement for her failing Palm Pilot to use for her doctor appointment reminders and to play some games while she waited to see the doctors.

I didn't expect that the iPad would replace the computer for her... but it has. Every time I go home to see her, its very evident that the PC is not being used at all.

So, for average Joes and Janes... I think it is a post-pc era... they use their phones and tablets for 99% of what they need a computer for... and can't figure out how to use their desktop to do that remaining 1%...

It really riles me that people are rejecting Windows 8 because it does not have a fucking 'Start' button. The mindless stupidity of it just boggles the mind.

Windows 8 is fast, lean and a impressive OS. It continues the great work done on Windows 7 and really builds on that foundation. How fucking stupid are these people that they don't understand the Metro start screen is just a full screen modern version of the start button? Lowest Common Denominator morons dragging the rest of us down with them.

Because everything about the Metro UI in Windows 8 is terrible, and it's a bit silly that you don't seem to notice. I'd argue you're the one in the dark here.

I have no problem with change. Useless, incredibly badly designed change, is what I have a problem with.

It really riles me that people are rejecting Windows 8 because it does not have a fucking 'Start' button. The mindless stupidity of it just boggles the mind.

Windows 8 is fast, lean and a impressive OS. It continues the great work done on Windows 7 and really builds on that foundation. How fucking stupid are these people that they don't understand the Metro start screen is just a full screen modern version of the start button? Lowest Common Denominator morons dragging the rest of us down with them.

I wonder how many of those Win8 licenses are being actively used with Win8 though. I grabbed a cheap $15 license because I bought a laptop in 2012, just as insurance in case Win8 was good. It wasn't, so I'm still using Win7. How many other people have bought the discounted $15 and $40 licenses and are just sitting on them like I am?

There are probably plenty of other people who have bought a PC with Win8 who downgraded to Win7 as well, this is the same phenomenon that Vista experienced and the numbers never properly reflected that. Vista's uptake rate was even lower than the official numbers projected because so many people bought PCs with Vista and downgraded them to XP (especially corporations). I expect that the situation with Win8 will be similar, especially when considering corporations are unlikely to want to re-train their entire staff for Win8 when WinXP/7's UIs have worked just fine for them.

I'm pretty sure no-one at Apple ever said the iPad was going to bring about the end of the PC era. Jobs made that post-PC comment as something that is happening, and it's not far off - we use tablets and phones now for a lot of what we used laptops for a few years ago.

That doesn't detract from the story though. Windows 8 almost can't be unsuccessful. It's installed by default on all new PCs, and Win7 is getting harder to find at retail.

This was what Jobs said:

"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks because that's what you needed on the farms." Cars became more popular as cities rose, and things like power steering and automatic transmission became popular."PCs are going to be like trucks," Jobs said. "They are still going to be around." However, he said, only "one out of x people will need them."Jobs said advances in chips and software will allow tablet devices like the iPad to do tasks that today are really only suited for a traditional computer, things like video editing and graphic arts work.The move, Jobs said, will make many PC veterans uneasy, "because the PC has taken us a long ways.""We like to talk about the post-PC era, but when it really starts to happen, it's uncomfortable," he said.

I'm pretty sure no-one at Apple ever said the iPad was going to bring about the end of the PC era. Jobs made that post-PC comment as something that is happening, and it's not far off - we use tablets and phones now for a lot of what we used laptops for a few years ago.

That doesn't detract from the story though. Windows 8 almost can't be unsuccessful. It's installed by default on all new PCs, and Win7 is getting harder to find at retail.

The iPad is just another kind of PC. Was Jobs' comment in the vein of Mac vs. PC? If so, I can understand his hubris, short sighted thought it may be.

When was last time you checked? I found everything I need for my RT tablet and then some. But really, how can you replace the Office that you get with the RT tablet? You can't if you need it. My wife and kid need it. For us it was a no brainer decision to go with Windows tablets.

And fun part is, MS could have scored big in the enterprises, and probably even bigger in small companies with RT tables, but no. They manage to fuck it up again. By loading non-upgradeable home and student version of Office on it, which does not allow any commercial usage. Good grief, really.

Real user share tells an entirely different story, and metric does not lie.Sales numbers instead says nothing, 100M licenses were put in the supply chain with no real demand for such a cheezzy product as Bob 8, and a lot of PC remained unsold, worsening the crisis of OEM and accelerating their runaway to Android product lines.

When was last time you checked? I found everything I need for my RT tablet and then some. But really, how can you replace the Office that you get with the RT tablet? You can't if you need it. My wife and kid need it. For us it was a no brainer decision to go with Windows tablets.

Do you really need a full-scale office for a tablet, which is a content-consuming product, not a content-creating one? Tablets as they are now ain't a full replacement for laptops, they more an addition to them. A good lightweight addition so that you don't need a laptop for every family member anymore. MS says you can have a hybrid of a tablet and a laptop. Personally I doubt that you will get a device that is as much powerful for creating content as an ultrabook is. At the same time with Windows RT you don't get many good quality applications apart from MS Office.

The netbook market was destroyed by the manufacturers jumping on the Ultrabook bandwagon.

Your history is inaccurate. Netbook was already in decline by late 2010, pummeled by the iPad. Meanwhile, the first Ultrabook didn't even hit the shelves until October 2011, and the market didn't really take off until 2012. Ultrabook was a response to the netbooks' faltering, not its cause.

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There's still a market for netbooks, but no-one sells them anymore.

Er, what? I found a bunch of models simply by googling "netbook 2013." Maybe you don't see them on retailer shelves because no one buys them. Doesn't surprise me in the least.

It really riles me that people are rejecting Windows 8 because it does not have a fucking 'Start' button. The mindless stupidity of it just boggles the mind.

Windows 8 is fast, lean and a impressive OS. It continues the great work done on Windows 7 and really builds on that foundation. How fucking stupid are these people that they don't understand the Metro start screen is just a full screen modern version of the start button? Lowest Common Denominator morons dragging the rest of us down with them.

Sorry, but you're wrong.

Metro is like the whacking great buttons on a pre-schooler's toy. I don't need a 3 inch wide button on my desktop monitor for Cow goes Moo thanks very much.

I've got developers trial Windows 8 running as a VM and behind the childish interface is superficially the same OS as Windows 7. I'm sure Windows 8 is more advanced but the user experience with BIG METRO BUTTONS in your face, frankly sucks balls. If the UX is all Win 8 brings to the table for most users, it ain't got shit.

What a perfect example of the original comment. "The click targets are too big and therefore Win8 is shit!" No ability to actually consider all the other improvements - you're just blinded by this emotional rage over the shape of the start menu items.

And no one ever actually explains why something larger is bad. It's just supposed to be obvious that your aesthetic preferences are the same as utility, but of course that's not the case. If I can select items more quickly than I could in the start menu, that's an improvement, regardless of whether it's a big square or some other shape.

What trend? That people don't have to replace their computers every two years? We can only hope that PC manufacturers don't latch on to the phone manufacturers' business model.

My guess is they probably will. PC manufacturers have pretty thin margins as is - with this they'll be struggling to break even. And they'll just accelerate the death spiral, by cutting costs and likely using low quality components in their PCs. That of course will raise breakdowns, customer unhappiness, and accelerate this whole trend.

The real question isn't that, the real question is, will Windows 8 further hurt Microsoft in the long run? Lets face it, for enterprise, most have agreements with Microsoft and contracts. For consumers, well, most computers we buy already have Windows 8 pre-installed. It's not so much driven by choice as it is Microsoft's dominance here. Even if you hated Microsoft, unless you get a Mac, you're still going to have to buy a PC/laptop and install whatever you wanted (probably Linux).

The PC certainly won't die. At least not for the next couple of decades - until a more efficient means of inputting information comes than the keyboard and mouse. Try typing a long report on an iPad. You probably won't get that kind of WPM that you would on a desktop. Content creation and anything resource intensive is still very much around whether or not tablets/smartphones are popular or not. But Microsoft, even if it the PC does not die, it may mean ceding it's once dominant position in the software world to someone else.

So, 2.5 attach rate for App Store downloads per install. That is NOT a healthy validation of the Win8 "metro" app model or market. Heck, I've downloaded a few dozen myself, and have probably launched only three in the last month. Given how many of those 250 downloads were probably done by curious tire-kickers like myself, I bet a whole swath of Win 8 systems haven't seen a single app download.

On my relatively big-screen systems, those full-screen apps are pretty darn annoying. And I've yet to see anyone make a HTML5 Win8 app as rich or functional as a real web page or a real app.

I figure a substantial minority of people downloaded Microsoft's Solitaire Collection. No telling how many kept it, though, after they saw it was chock full of ads, and later dangled a subscription scheme. A lot of people also probably downloaded apps like Dropbox or Twitter, only to find they were less-featured than the standalone versions.

And no one ever actually explains why something larger is bad. It's just supposed to be obvious that your aesthetic preferences are the same as utility, but of course that's not the case. If I can select items more quickly than I could in the start menu, that's an improvement, regardless of whether it's a big square or some other shape.

Big buttons are good for a touch screen because of the size of fingers, but for a regular desktop with a keyboard and a mouse it's definitely a bad thing. The bigger buttons you have, the less buttons you can fit on a screen and the longer distance you have to travel with your mouse to press it. That decreases the productivity of an experienced user (the one who knows which buttons to press to get his work done). While big buttons can seem more attractive to a novice user as they are more distinguishable and readable, all the beginners tend to become experienced users pretty fast and they start to face the problem that their productivity is restricted by the mouse distance. I thought that was obvious.